The seventh million: the Israelis and the Holocaust

Historythat the Swedish authorities made 'a consistent determined effort to ship as much iron ore and steel ball bearings to Gennany as possible'.He suggests, interestingly, that opinion in Eire hardened further against the Germans after they followed the bombing of Belfast in April 1941 with their (probably unintended) attack on Dublin in May.He annihilates the Pope in a single sentence: in June 1944 'Pius XII, who had not been unduly worried by the actions of German occupation forces in Europe, now asked that Black soldiers not be included among the Allied units stationed in Rome'.Occasionally, of course, Weinberg goes astray, as when he repeats the familiar error that the majority of 'British' soldiers at El Alamein were not from the United Kingdom.Weinberg has thought about the decisive strategic issues of the war and presents carefully reasoned conclusions.He understands the British decision to carry on in 1940 and dismisses those who fidget about concealment ofrecords by plausibly suggesting that 'much ofthe closed material concerns the antics of the Duke of Windsor'.He crosses out in a single sentence the tenaciously held British supposition that the German attack on the USSR in 1941 was delayed by the campaign against Greece.In a well-argued discussion of Pearl Harbor he uses a note to dismiss 'the nonsense about Churchill knowing ahead of time'.He assesses the case for the landing in north-west Africa, though showing unusual sympathy for Churchill's schemes for landings in Norway.He documents Brooke's opposition and Churchill's shiftiness and backsliding towards the great invasion of northern France.He understandably mocks their hostility to the subsidiary landing in the south of France.Perhaps he exaggerates the importance of Allied slowness in closing the Falaise gap-here Weinberg begins a series of attacks on Montgomery.He believes the Soviet halt before Warsaw after the rising was politically inspired, not a military necessity.Generally he takes the SHAEF view of strategy against Germany in 1944-45 rather than Montgomery's.The author is not given to social or economic analysis.He has surprisingly little on production of weapons for war and even less on the effects of war on education, nutrition, women and non-combatants, or on art and literature.His book is a political and military study and one of the highest quality.It is written with uncompromising scholarship and its prose is correspondingly austere.